A Dictionary Updated, and a Campaign to Spread the Word

The fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language will be marketed in a variety of traditional and new ways.

STUART ELLIOTT

TRYING to sell a $60 print dictionary in 2011 is like trying to sell a silent movie.

Wait ...What’s that? The Weinstein Company is releasing “The Artist,” a modern-day silent movie, in theaters on Nov. 25?

O.K., how is this: Trying to sell a $60 print dictionary in 2011 is like trying to sell a print newspaper.

Wait ...What’s that? Many people are reading this article in print newspapers?

Well, it goes to show, the line between the legacy media and the new media is not as finely drawn as some believe. That is particularly true in this instance, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt begins a campaign to market the fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Executives at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt say they do not believe they will sell as many print copies of the new dictionary as they did of previous editions. That is why there is a free companion Web site for the dictionary, at ahdictionary.com. That is also why the dictionary is being made available as an app and for e-readers. (The app is free with the purchase of the print dictionary and $24.99 if bought separately. The app is published by Enfour, to which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has licensed the rights. The e-reader version, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has a suggested list price of $60.)

The executives also believe, however, that many consumers will still find value in owning a dictionary of more than 2,000 pages in book form, and the marketing campaign reflects that.

The campaign, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, has an estimated $300,000 budget. Most of the work is being created by Mechanica, an agency in Newburyport, Mass., and the rest by Verso Advertising in New York.

The campaign’s theme is “You are your words. Make the most of them.” In keeping with the interaction between the print and digital versions of the dictionary, the campaign has an extensive presence online as well as in print (newspapers and magazines) and on radio (sponsorship credits on NPR).

For instance, the theme is brought to life in a microsite, or special Web site, at youareyourwords.com, where computer users can create images composed of word clouds.

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The dictionary also has its own Twitter handle, @ahdictionary. In recent days, people who have been using interesting words in their Twitter posts — among them, “belie” and “disingenuous” — have won free dictionaries.

The campaign was inspired by research conducted by Mechanica that showed surprising results, said Bruce Nichols, a senior vice president and publisher at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York.

“You might think, if you had to guess, that there’s an old-fashioned slice of the market that wants a print dictionary and a younger, hipper slice that wants it digitally,” Mr. Nichols said. “But the audience most likely to buy the new edition in print is the same audience likely to consume it in multiple formats.”

“Our main target wants a print edition at home for the kids, to have a richer experience looking up words,” he added, “and they want it on their devices to have it everywhere.”

“The print market is certainly nothing like it was 10 years ago,” Mr. Nichols said, when the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary was published, “and the digital world is a lot bigger.” But the research “convinced us the way to market the new edition is by appealing to the thirst for knowledge” of the target audience “by reaching them in every possible way,” he added.

Jim Garaventi, founding partner and creative director at Mechanica, said: “A book like this, a dictionary, an American Heritage dictionary, is a different type of book. It’s a beautiful object. There’s also a utility to the object and it says something more to own it.”

At the same time, he added, consumers with a propensity to purchase dictionaries in book form “also index high in the purchase and use of e-readers.”

The “You are your words” theme signals how “we define ourselves through the written word more deeply, more broadly than ever, through tweets, through posts,” Mr. Garaventi said.

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In the end, he said, “people go where the information is that they want,” adding: “I don’t think they start by saying, ‘Am I going to go online? Or offline?’ Those of us in advertising, media and marketing tend to dissect online and offline more than people who don’t make a living that way do.”

For example, Mr. Garaventi described his recent experience buying the biography of Steven P. Jobs by Walter Isaacson. “I never spent so much time deciding” between a print book and a download, he said, laughing, before finally selecting the book.

Tom Thompson, vice president and group director at Verso, which is creating the print ads, agreed that “there is so much play between the print and digital environments that it’s not an ‘either/or’ ” for consumers.

“The connectivity is the way things are right now,” Mr. Thompson said.

Still, “there’s a place in this world for a beautifully made book,” he added, noting that “people still want a four-color cookbook for the shelf” when “it’s so easy to get a recipe online.”

The newspaper and magazine ads will be aimed at that market, Mr. Thompson said, which he called “the hard-core book-buying audience.” Those ads will run in Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review.

If such shoppers represent a countertrend, will their behavior be defined in a future dictionary as “booklash”?

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